Growth Hacking Best Practices: Strategies from Seung Oh

All right, welcome to Hack to the Future with Kyle Roof. I am Kyle Roof and today we have Sung who's the CEO of Data B. Welcome Sung, how are you doing?

Doing great, how are you?

I'm doing good. Thanks for being here. You're the guest. I'm not the guest. good. So I know that growth hacking is a big part of your success. I know that people have heard the term growth hacking, but how would you define what is growth hacking?

Yeah. I would say just trying out different methods that are being discussed and some of them may work and some of them may not. So that's why you need to keep experimenting with different methodologies and strategies. And ultimately when you find the ones that work for you, then you'll start to grow. And I think that's the core of the growth hacking.

Can you give an example of something that is a growth hack?

Yeah, so I can think about different examples, but one thing that I can think of in especially marketing, a lot of people talk about SEO, and that starts with the right set of keywords and the right targets and stuff. So you just have to try different keywords in different markets and for different segments. And if you keep trying, then you may end up finding the right targets and the right set of keywords that work for you. Or you may not. Then you just have to move on to different hacks that people discuss.

okay, okay. When you say people discuss like where if somebody wants to start learning about finding these growth hacks, like where do you hear about them or who's talking about these things?

Actually, I go to YouTube and LinkedIn and I just search Google and type growth hacks, and then I quickly get a lot of results. And actually, that's good and bad because there are tons of different articles that talk about growth hacking. So I just have to peek into the ones that matter and that sounds reasonable. But since there are so many articles to choose from, it is not about that the information isn't there. It's just more about finding the right information.

okay. If somebody is an obvious liar, they're talking about growth hacking, but they don't know what they're doing. Is there something that you've heard that like, yeah, that's just not good or that's not true? Like, do you have some sort of like filter or a measurement like, where you can say if somebody's BS or not?

It is hard and yeah, I think it's more of a, that people, most of them have good intention. Well, some of them try to just blot things over and they try to just sell stuff. I would say most of them have good intentions to help other people, but It's just the nature of growth hacks that things do not always work and do not, some things do not make sense at all, but I would say most of them sound reasonable enough so that's why I kind of ended up trying many of them and failed eventually on many of them as well. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't think some of them look BS, but I would say everybody has good intentions.

I do like it though, if somebody's immediately selling you something, then you should be a little skeptical. Through the growth hacking and the tests that you've done with growth hacking, do you have a lesson learned or the biggest lesson learned that you can share?

Yeah, one thing that I learned from my experience is not to put too much time and energy into one thing. For example, so we tried SEO with different methodologies for over three months. I think I should have stopped or at least reduce the amount of investment that I've been putting in that particular area at some point because things do not always work and SEO hasn't been a great source of traffic for us, at least for our main webpage, Engram.

I think that's pretty interesting. SEO is generally considered a long-term play. But if you're looking for a growth hack, that's short-term. We're trying to do this in the shortest amount of time possible. So would you say, like in that three months or so, if you're running, say, a test to see if a growth hack will work, do you think maybe three months or less is about the time frame that you would do something before you move on? Or maybe less?

Yeah, so I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to make a decision and move on to a different thing completely. I think we need to re-evaluate the amount of energy and effort and time that we are spending on one particular initiative. Because I didn't mean to stop SEO effort at all, but I should have adjusted our resources a little bit to be more efficient in our overall marketing strategy.

Do you see where the, your crystal ball, where is the future of growth hacking going? Do you think there might be growth hacks on other social media platforms like TikTok or maybe waiting for the next platform to come out? Would you jump on that? Where does the future of growth hacking go?

I'm not sure whether this is talking about the future, but micro-influencers have been pretty promising so far for us. And I believe this way of marketing will be promising for the at least next few years because Social media is everywhere and short forms are everywhere. And tons of creators are that that just start to become influencers one day so we can leverage them to market our product. And given that social media is getting bigger every day, there will be a lot of niches that we can target. So in that way, I believe this micro influencer marketing will still be very promising over the next few years. And like based on my experience working on different marketing strategies, I believe micro-influencer is the most promising marketing initiative that I've been experiencing. And actually, that's one of the biggest or marketing issues or marketing discussions that I've been reading these days.

I love that. I want to talk more about micro-influencers, but I have a very important question. Now we play the game, which is better? In Korean food, which is better? Dweji Galbi or Dak Galbi?

Of course, Dak Galbi.

My notes here, are incorrect. The correct answer was Dak Galbi. I love Dak Galbi.

Why? You know what? I'm from a small city, a small rural city in Gangwon province.

I lived in Gangwon-do for five years.

Interesting. Dakgalbi originated from that area. And actually, I lived in Chuncheon, which is that city.

I know, I lived in Hongchang. Yes, and people from Honchan say that Chunchan stole Dak Galbi from them.

That could be possible, but I ate a lot of that growing up, so that's why I don't like to eat more. I had enough.

That's great. For those who don't know, Dak Galbi is a dish where it's cooked in front of you. It's a chicken dish and it has cabbage and maybe a few other things like onion or carrot and a red sauce that it's cooked in front of you. Delicious. And sweet. And maybe the little rice sticks, the Tokbokki.

and suit your taste.

Wow, you did a good job.

But then the trick is though, you have to leave a little towards the end. Don't eat it all. Cause then they'll bring out rice and then they'll do the fried rice and mix it in. And it's delicious. That's kind of like a dessert rice. that's excellent. okay. I guess, more importantly, micro-influencers. how do you define a micro-influencer? Like when does somebody, I know that's probably like, you know, grains of sand kind of argument, but who is a micro-influencer versus an influencer? Like, what are you looking for in terms of like maybe a following or the reach or what are you looking for to say like, this is a micro influencer and also somebody that we might want to do business with?

okay, in general, people have different definitions of micro influencers and that definition is usually according to the number of followers that particular influencer has. So I believe it's like if the number of followers is below 100k, then people define it as micro-influencer, but that depends on different people. In general, actually, my definition is somewhat similar, but I would say micro-influencers are the ones that I can work with less than a thousand dollars.

I like that definition. okay. Sure. They're at the point where $1,000 sounds reasonable. I got you. Yeah.

So. The reason we are working with micro-influencers is that they do not ask for a huge price as macro influencers do. But still, even though they do not have a large audience, and even if their content doesn't get a lot of views, they may still ask for $5,000. Those things happened to us. So we ended up not working with those influencers that asked too much. So I would actually, and the reason we are working with micro-influencers is to save cost and maximize our ROI. In that case, if you end up paying for like $3,000, then it's really hard to justify ROI unless some of the content goes like huge, like millions, right? So that's why I stick to my definition that if we can work with less than $1,000, I think I would consider that person as a micro-influencer.

Are you concerned about the platform when you're working with micro-influencers? Would you lean towards YouTube, people that have a YouTube channel, or are you looking towards other platforms as well?

So three major platforms deal with short forms, which are getting more and more popular these days. So YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. So those are the three platforms we generally see that influencers work on. And I heard that the audience, the general user demographic for TikTok is somewhat lower, like 10 to 20. And people who use Instagram are much older, like 20 to 30, 40, and YouTube similar. So we tend to stick with Instagram and YouTube. And, sometimes influencers ask us if we want to upload the same video on TikTok as well. So if that doesn't cost a lot, then we just agree on that.

ok, so you do like taking, say, the same content if they'll post it on multiple things. Do you like that? At the beginning, I mentioned, that you're the CEO of DataB. For those that aren't familiar, can you tell us what your company does?

For sure, DataB is a company behind a service called Engram. Engram is an AI writing tool with all the best parts of ChatGPT, Grammarly, and QuillBud combined. And it is optimized for non-native English speakers. By the way, is it okfor me to kind of say those brands out loud? Is it ok? Or? ok.

Yeah, They're not sponsoring us, so it doesn't matter.

yeah, I mean, we can say that. Well, they may disagree with us, but it's okay. We are on the docks, so we need to be a bit more aggressive.

That's fine. The 20 people listening to this podcast won't care.

You can proofread, paraphrase, and translate your way to native-level English, native-level writing if you are a non-native English speaker. So we are specifically targeting non-native English speakers with our service and grant.

okay, so than going to the micro-influencers, would you be looking for say someone in South Korea who was working with say the Korean market maybe people who wanted to move into other markets? Is that something that would be a use case for a micro-influencer?

similar but a little bit different. So there is some context behind this. So, Engram, well, I came up with this idea because I used to work for Amazon in the United States in Seattle. So at that time, I had to write a lot of documents, but my English wasn't at the native level. So that's why I thought that this kind of tool might help people like me. So actually, we found a micro-influencer that has a similar persona. So the person we worked with recently got pretty big views, a pretty big number of views, she works for an American company in the United States, but she is from Korea. So she's not a native English speaker. And her vlogs are about her everyday life, working for American companies and just doing things in the United States. And her target audience includes people who want to go to the United States and work for an American company or want to learn English, learn business English especially, so that they can work with American clients and stuff. So that's why she kind of understood our product perfectly and could create content that explains a lot of the advantages of using Engram.

Love that. One final question on that. When you're working with them, do you give an incentive, kind of like a coupon code or a discount code, kind of to track performance and then also to kind of give a benefit to the influencer? Is that something that is involved in this?

So. So we give out promo codes to those influencers and those influencers can say out loud those promo codes so that their audience can use them. But promo codes are actually for us. The purpose of giving out promo codes is not to track the performance of those micro-influencers. It's more about us getting new customers and they and proportion of those new customers will end up paying for our premium membership. So it'll help us increase our revenue. Well, I get a lot of advice around how to track the performance of individual influencers using promo codes or pay by the number of views and stuff. But so far, what we've seen is that the biggest motivation for those micro-influencers is the number of views they get. So I mean, one of the influencers sent me an email saying thank you for this collaboration because she accrued 1,500 new followers by like, making the collaboration content live. So actually, she wanted to, well, those are micro-influencers, one day, they aspire to become macro influencers. So they want to get more views more followers and more subscribers. So the biggest motivation for them is to grow. And if the content that we work with can help them grow. That's the biggest motivation that they can get as micro-influencers.

Love that. Song, if people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

just go to Google and type Engram, Engram.us then you can find us and I'm the CEO. So you can, and I read all the customer emails. So if you want to reach out to me, just, send an email, using the address at the bottom of the page, then you can directly talk to me.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. This was fantastic information. I loved it. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

And thanks, everyone, for listening to Hack to the Future. And we will talk to you next time. Take care.